On A Moonlit Midnight 217 Years Ago . . .

April 16, 1992

To add a special dimension to your appreciation of history, travel to the edge of Boston Harbor Saturday evening and then drive out to Lexington and Concord. If the sky is clear, the bright moon will shine across the water and illuminate the countryside exactly as it did 217 years ago on the night before the start of the Revolution.

In one of those delightful examples of purely incidental research that occasionally are published in learned journals, astronomers have established that the moon and tide this year will be exactly as they were during the adventure described by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem that begins:

Listen my children and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year. The bright moon made the trip especially dangerous. Revere had to row a circuitous route across Boston Harbor to Charlestown to escape detection from lookouts aboard the British man-of-war HMS Somerset.

And it was the moonlight that, in part, led to his capture. British soldiers spotted Revere and William Dawes riding just beyond Lexington late that night and stopped them. The third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott, saw the commotion, avoided the troops and reached Concord.

But the brightness of the moon also helped the militia to spot and harass the advancing British. Would the king's troops have fared better on a dark and moonless night?